Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse
You know that old saying, "if it ain't broke, don't try and fix it"? Yeeeahhhhh...
Published: March 6, 2005
"Upgrade" would be an understatement. Along with the game's shift to more realistic characters comes a level of complexity in the battle system that borders on overwhelming, and it'll likely take hours before you come to grips with how the fights progress. Each enemy has a handful of zones, usually B or C (flying enemies are almost always A zone), which can be attacked with the square and triangle buttons, respectively.
If you manage to attack an enemy's specific weak zones in sequence, you "break" their guard, leaving them open to an attack that can either eject them into the air or slam them down on the ground. Once in air or down status, any and all attacks will do 1.5 times damage, and if you "boost" a player, a feature that returns from the first game, you can can have them cut in line before the turn ends, allowing your characters to jump in and attack the downed enemy.
Confused yet? Yeah, it gets worse. To boost, unlike the first game, you simply attack enemies and the team's overall boost meter will charge up to three levels allowing up to three characters to cut in line. To execute big strings of powerful attacks (or, more importantly to take advantage of a broken enemy's vulnerability to an air or down status attack), teammates must "stock" their attacks from that turn, allowing them to dish out a bigger attack string with the circle button (which, incidentally, is the only attack that can apply an air or down effect to an enemy).
Boss fights in particular require that you wrap your head around the process of breaking the enemy -- and bosses usually have three or four zones to attack in a single turn before they're even broken, which means players have to boost in just to break them before they can even being putting them in an air or down state -- then attacking with everything you have to beat them while they're down.
Not very fair for the bad guys, is it? Oh, but they can do the same to you. Uh, and there's more. You can now only boost if your character's turn isn't coming up, which means they will have to already have gone first, forcing a massive amount of planning in even simple battles to unleash an attack. It's a great idea in practice, but it becomes tedious when fighting common enemies, and it only really works as long as everyone obeys the rules. But then, bosses don't like to obey the rules. Hell, some basic enemies don't like to obey the rules, and it ruins the battles.
Some enemies and nearly all bosses are completely capable of boosting in on top of themselves, which you can actually do with a power-up bought later in the game, but when they start boosting when they're down, or boost on top of your boost, it becomes a case of flagrant cheating, and the game loves to milk it for all its worth, leading to plenty of cases where you can do nothing but stare open-mouthed at the bullshit taking place on your TV.
You can tap into the BS a bit yourself with a little power leveling and some strategic planning with the game's skills system, but this too is overly complex. Four levels of classes, ranging from ethers (spells), equippable attributes and permanently learned skills can be bought using a combination of class points and skill points. Each class is subdivided into 10 subsets, and inside those are four skills you can buy, but only after spending class points to "unlock" the class. You can then spend skill points to learn the moves. Learning four skills in one class will give you bonus class points and unlock the next level up.
The problem here is not only the complexity of the system, but the ridiculousness of the process of buying the scattered skills across so many levels. Some of the higher-level abilities, which it's doubtful anyone but the most hardcore will take the time to earn, can't even be seen until you run a side quest or open an out-of-the-way treasure chest to unlock the Secret Key which then unlocks a pre-set skill on the list (usually nothing you'd use all that much anyway).
Everything about the game's battle system seems needlessly grandiose, and it's a shame because the rest of the game looks and sounds gorgeous. The presentation values have shot up substantially, and even something as simple as running around some of the lavishly adorned environments feels more like a movie thanks to well-placed pre-set camera angles that swing out or in or across to allow a better view of things when running around corners.
